MANSFIELD, OH - Mountain TEA Studios is a creative life partnership between visual artists Mark Flowers and Kristy Higby. Making and teaching art has been at the heart of their life’s work for 41 years. Mark & Kristy’s studio work includes mixed media narrative paintings, sculptural artists’ books, and socially relevant documentaries.

Flowers and Higby are bringing their art to the Mansfield Art Center from September 30th to October 29th and will host an opening reception on Saturday, September 30th from 7 - 9 P.M.

Flowers describes his relationship with art as follows:

I have always made use of painting to understand my relationship with the world. My works are stories – small insights and reflections of my experiences. In seeking meaning in the world, I am sharing my story in hopes of making common connections with others.

My work has many layers; formally, it is about shape, objective and non-objective imagery existing in the same field. The interaction of image, shape, and surface appeals to me aesthetically. Conceptually, they are about telling small stories of insight. I see my work as visual poetry making sense of the world around me.

Higby describes her series:

Uncertain Relations is a series that explores the connections between poem and reader, art and viewer, poem and sculptural form.

Poems that involve me the most are ones that reveal themselves to the reader in a captivating and measured way. That is also what attracts me to artists’ books as an art form. Like a well-told story it can make the viewer curious about what’s next as well as engage them through touch. When a particular poem on a page in a printed book makes you stop, draw in a breath, and not want to turn the next page it deserves to stand-alone. The artist book allows for that and adds a physical and tactile dimension to the poem’s voice.

An important personal aspect of this series is a very comfortable connection for me between my interest in art and technology (specifically digital imaging) and my aesthetic preference to work with certain physical materials, tools, and processes.